Your porn habits might be making Wi-Fi slow

Your porn habits might be making Wi-Fi slow

HAVE you spotted your Wi-Fi running suspiciously slowly or noticed your web-connected home gadgets crashing for no reason?

There's a chance that your router, smartphone or even baby monitor might be a "zombie" that's playing a part in a worldwide criminal network, reports The Sun.

Laptops and webcams are just a few of the gadgets that hackers are able to remotely take over and form "bot" networks or "botnets" made up of millions of hijacked devices.

These botnets seize control of internet-connected gadgets and put them to work spreading malware, generating spam and committing credit card fraud across the world.

In 2016, more than 6.7 million gadgets around the world were hijacked for these nefarious purposes.

Hackers can turn gadgets into botnets by infecting them with malware - something easily picked up while visiting a dodgy (read: porn) website or clicking on a pop-up advert - and victims will have absolutely no idea it's happened.

Candid Wueest, Norton Security Expert said: "More than 13.8 million people in the UK were victims of online crime in the past year, and bots and botnets are a key tool in the cyber attacker's arsenal."

Unbeknown to most of the general public, the Mirai botnet - made up of almost half a million gadgets including webcams and home routers - spread like wildfire in 2016.

During its peak, gadgets were being taken over every two minutes.

Mirai spread worldwide but nearly a third of attacks originated from devices in Europe.

It made numerous high-profile websites inaccessible as a result of an attack on DNS provider Dyn last October.

Web-connected CCTV cameras and routers were hacked by malicious code that took advantage of default passwords to create a powerful attack platform which reportedly took entire nations - like Liberia - offline.

ARE YOU PART OF A BOTNET? HOW TO STAY PROTECTED

A bot might cause a device to slow down, display mysterious messages, or even crash for no apparent reason.